Restoration of The Commons

Thursday, 02 February 2017

from the Social Credit Discussion Group:Question and statement:It is true that Social Credit was never proposed or discussed by the Fathers of the Church, the Doctors of the Church, or even the great Reformation theologians. It may be one way of improving the distribution/sharing of wealth, but not the only way. According to Acts of the Apostles, the earliest Christian community held all goods in common. No one kept anything for him or herself. Similarly, the great cenobitic communities of pagan, Christian, and other (such as Buddhist) traditions. In our contemporary times, the Focalare Economy of Communion takes a different approach to achieving a degree of equity in a community. In fact, in terms of spiritual development and commitment, these traditions offer something that Social Credit does not: personal gift and personal renunciation. Social Credit seems in some respects rather like a way of restoring the "commons", the pre-capitalist provision that certain lands were dedicated to communal purposes, so anyone could graze stock, gather wood, catch game, etc. of course, after the notorious Enclosure of the Commons, appropriation of that common resource for the private exploitation by the gentry, country-folk who snared a rabbit for the pot could hang for poaching.Social Credit seems to postulate an analogy to the "commons" in the society's endowment of technology, institutions, etc. Please correct me if I misapprehend that point. G

Response:Yes, Social Credit is a method of restoring the commons within the context of an industrial or high-tech economy. By taking advantage of the flaw in the existing price system, i.e., the fact that the financial system creates costs in the form of debts to the banking system (since most production is undertaken on the basis of short-term and/or long-term bank loans) at a faster rate than it distributes incomes to consumers (in the form of wages, salaries, dividends, profits, etc.), Social Credit proposes to introduce a new principle of distribution that would represent the 'free gift' or 'free lunch' inherent to economic reality.

More specifically, Social Credit would monetize these unfunded debts in the price structure with a corresponding volume of 'debt-free' credit and distribute it on behalf of (in the case of the compensated price/ National Discount) or directly to (in the case of the National Dividend) consumers. The supplemental 'debt-free' credit would cancel out the corresponding unfunded debts (costs) when used to purchase the remainder of the economy's consumer output. This would, in effect, provide the community with an updated version of the commons (one that is appropriate to an industrial economy).

Distributive justice would also, it is anticipated, be better served by this set-up in comparison with the existing order, which, all too often, is characterized by debt and wage slavery and gross inequities and inefficiencies of all sorts.Of course, personal gifts and renunciation are free to occur in a SC commonwealth as in any other. Indeed, SC may very well make it possible for some people to finally have some material wealth that they can afford to give away in the form of a gift. MOH

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